Youtube to disconinue IE, older browser support

[MrBurgerKing]

https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/27596769

Just in time for the sunsetting of Windows 7, Youtube has started showing banners that they will be disabling the old desktop ui and forcing the updated "polymer" layout in March 2020.

Launched in 2017, the polymer redesign applied Google's "Material Design" language, trading shaded, static elements for blinding white and javascript heavy animations. While it looks slick, the lack of contrast and shading on elements and buttons makes it a little harder to use. It's also slower on low end hardware / internet connections, and quirks in the implementation mean fully HTML5 complaint browsers may not render it correctly.

Even major browsers like Trident Edge and Firefox had issues, and some Microsoft engineers cited polymer as one of the reasons for transitioning Edge from Trident to Chromium.

Internet Explorer, along with other older or obscure browsers that can't render polymer, will be unable to access the site.

[Winins]

Man, that’s a bummer. I use Chrome 49(don’t ask me why) and I won’t access YouTube...

[MrBurgerKing]

Windows XP baybeeeeeee!!!!
Chrome49 should handle polymer just fine. It will just be slower/more power consuming (especially on older hardware with weaker graphics chips) and harder to use (especially on not-widescreens thanks to the inflated padding).

It's just a shame because Twitter, Reddit, Deviantart etc. all allow their users to opt out of their redesigns and switch back. The cost of keeping obsoleted layouts available is minimal. If I had to guess what their real motivation is, it's probably to force the last 7%-9% of people using Internet Explorer to Chrome and motivate new pc/chromebook sales.

Google wants to control the browser market so they can push the technologies important to them, and also push Google services and data collection. Chrome encourages users to use Google products, and create a Google account to be tracked by.
Google also doesn't mind obsoleting semi-current devices, since they not only benefit from the sales revenue of new devices, but also from bundling/promoting services with those devices, and from using the extra horsepower in new PCs to do more data collection in the background.

[dj_cityboy]

ugh i just experienced this and its the only reason why i updated to EDGE, i mean EDGE on Win7 seems pretty good so far but i have only had it installed for a week

peas
cityboy

[SistemaRayoXP]

Windows XP baybeeeeeee!!!!

Offtopic Comment

Have you heard about New Moon? Pale Moon?

[Winins]

I use Windows Vista.

Offtopic Comment

100th post!

[yourepicfailure]

ugh i just experienced this and its the only reason why i updated to EDGE, i mean EDGE on Win7 seems pretty good so far but i have only had it installed for a week

The Chromium Edge is not at all bad, I too use it to view websites that only play well on Chrome. Slightly faster than the Google Chrome. And it looks like I may have to use it on Google services now.
I do wish they would've at least tried to bring over Edge's UI style. To me, it looks like any other Chrome clone.

[wavemaster76]

I’d like to have the old Edge Design in the new edge, that’s why I‘ve been using it for about 3 years now.

[MrBurgerKing]

I use Windows Vista.

Oh right, I forgot the devs merged Vista into the XP branch to save on time and cost.

Offtopic Comment

Have you heard about New Moon? Pale Moon?

Yes, but besides having compatibility issues on some websites (everyone develops for chrome now) it can't render polymer either and will stop working with Youtube in March also.

Edit: Palemoon works with polymer

[DVINTHEHOUSEMAN]

Polymer is garbage tbh, I preferred Classic.

[mibrab]

To be fair, this was only a matter of time. The only real reason why the classic style is still available alongside polymer is, that polymer is still missing certain features (channel page modifications for example). I wonder if these will be implemented into polymer by the time classic gets disabled or if they will just force polymer further and still keep falling back to classic for these features.

[SistemaRayoXP]

Offtopic Comment

Have you heard about New Moon? Pale Moon?

Yes, but besides having compatibility issues on some websites (everyone develops for chrome now) it can't render polymer either and will stop working with Youtube in March also.

Hmmm... I wonder if is this fake...


Yes, you can still use XP/Vista and YouTube. Pale Moon already enabled Polymer on 28.8.2, and New Moon as well in its latest build (28.9.0 I think).

So there you have it, an IE alternative that you can trust.

And maybe some websites get a little picky, but it's mostly due to user agents. If you fake your UA to Chrome, many sites load properly.

The sad thing about this, is that now it's going to be super hard or totally impossible to load YouTube on Windows 98/2000. And all because everyone started using Chrome, a Google browser. Now they control the web, just like Microsoft used to back in the IE days, such a sad thing, such a wish for another anti-trust but against Google.

This is why you should not be using Chrome, neither any Google services.

[win32]

Windows 2000 with Extended Kernel doesn't have any issues with loading Polymer v1 in New Moon 28/Serpent. But the status of NM26.5 for vanilla win2k is unknown.

My Core Duo T2400 chokes on Polymer though, especially since it runs at 1 GHz most of the time to keep temperatures low. Even at that frequency, I can play 720p videos in WMP9 fine with 30% CPU usage, yet 480p on YouTube is choppy at times. It really angers me to see all that bloat hidden behind a so-called minimalist "material" design.

So I recommend using a front-end like invidio.us, which allows you to easily download videos by right-clicking on them, for playing in a local video player on really old hardware. But it's not much faster than Polymer v1 though.

It's a shame that there is so much Google inertia nowadays. A nasty attribute of being forced to do group projects in school is that the other members usually insist on Google Docs which is also really sluggish compared to my Office 2007. And now I've noticed sites (script-infested ones of course) recommending Google Chrome for the best experience if not forcing it completely.

It's like the early 2000s again when some sites only worked in MSIE and others were littered in "get IE6!" buttons.

[yourepicfailure]

Looks like Opera 42 (Chrome 55) is able to run Polymer. 2016 browser I tell you. Probably shouldn't be using that dated browser either, but whatever.
Google just auto-dumped it on me today with no option to disable.

So that's the low bar so far to me. It's very laggy on a Celeron G4900 playback and general website interaction.

[MrBurgerKing]

480p on YouTube is choppy at times.

That sounds like a problem with the player. Your graphics adapter probably supports hardware accelerated H264 decoding, but not VP9. I've gotten way improved performance and thermal/power usage by disabling vp9. You can disable it manually in many browsers, conveniently Chrome isn't one of them and requires the use of a 3rd party extension like h264ify.

Google just auto-dumped it on me today with no option to disable.

Weird, that's earlier than they said they would do that.
You can try re-enabling it by adding &f6=8 to your PREF cookie in devtools.

Hmmm... I wonder if is this fake...

No, I took that screenshot on Pale Moon 28.8.0. I guess they fixed youtube compatibility in a later update. Thanks for correcting me!

[icanttellyou]

Google is still trying to get everyone not using Chrome to use Chrome, they just want to dominate the browser market so they could get more customers and well be more like Microsoft back when Internet Explorer was a thing. And I even used old YouTube because they tried to push a mobile first home screen to desktops and you know, I don't like phones that much.

[yourepicfailure]

You can try re-enabling it by adding &f6=8 to your PREF cookie in devtools

Thanks I'll give it a try. Want to keep using the old youtube as long as I can. Don't exactly have the money on hand to leave that Celeron.

There's no little message or anything. I just have Polymer and I hate it. Mass clutter and disarray. With ads taking up a grand quarter of the screen. And then everything is super enlarged. I mean it's great for me with bad eyesight but the Zoom function of the browser scaled better.
You'd think with big €€€ Google could do better. But no.
Then either you have blinding white or switch to "Dark Mode" where the greys are so close to each other they blend in.

[MishterKirby]

Material Design looks slick, but I dread it every time I have to go to a page that uses it, because they're slow.

I remember when opening a YouTube video took less than 15 seconds, but now it sometimes takes around a minute, just for it to stutter when I scroll down or switch from another tab back to YouTube.

[stashakk]

I mean.... do you want to get hacked?

Because if you care about security and you're connected to the internet, you should be running latest clients and kernels. If you don't believe me, just take a look at the CVE and type in some of the old stuff I've seen mentioned in this discussion. Asking to get pwnd

Win2000, XP, Vista, Win7.... all pwnd. IE..... pwnd. Be happy that software providers are collectively taking security seriously now mi amigos. Took them long enough

[Hyoenmadan86]

Google is still trying to get everyone not using Chrome to use Chrome, they just want to dominate the browser market so they could get more customers and well be more like Microsoft back when Internet Explorer was a thing. And I even used old YouTube because they tried to push a mobile first home screen to desktops and you know, I don't like phones that much.

The difference is that actually Google succeded on making MS browser monopoly dream real. Why? Because unlike back them, no one is opposing this. Everyone is just embracing Chromium koolaid (as a web browser, or as an application framework called electron) with a big smile in their faces. Is like Apple M1 and M2 embracer bots. Everyone now wants to get the corporation leash, because is trendy, is comfy and looks cool.

MS tried by bribing corporations to use ActiveX and ASP... Somewhat worked, but in the end opposition made them fail. Google posed as a "Social Justice Warrior" for the "Open Internet", appealing first to the nerds, and then to the masses... "Internet has to be open" they used to say. Success, It worked.

[AlphaBeta]

Well nobody had the guts to sue Google yet. Where there is no plaintiff, there is no judge.